If you’re not using eBay Offers to Buyers then you’re missing out as it’s now generated over $1 billion additional GMV for eBay sellers so far this year. Not bad for a feature that was only dreamed up and built in the past couple of years.
If you’re a sensible seller, the first question you will want answered is do eBay Offers to Buyers really work? Well if $1 billion additional sales across the whole of eBay isn’t a big enough convincer, then our own David Brackin did some quantitative research right here in the UK and discovered the take up is worth the investment in time to manage sending Offers to buyers.
David also looked at different offer percentage discounts to find out what value offer was good enough to trigger purchasing activity. The offer price you send needs to be at least 5% lower than the original price on the listing for items with a Buy It Now price under £200. If your listing’s Buy It Now price is between £200 and £1,000, your offer must be at least 3%, and you can offer as little as 2% for items over £1,000.
If you really don’t want to manually send offers, in October this year eBay introduced Auto Send Offer to Buyers. eBay will automatically check for new interested buyers every 24 hours from when you first send the offer until the listing ends or you manually cancel the Auto Send Offer to Buyers option. The automatic offer will be the same discount that you set up in the original offer.
With the popularity of this feature among sellers, eBay explored additional updates which would make the tool even more useful. One update was the ability to counter-negotiate. More than 60% of offers have counters enabled, resulting in about a quarter of all Offer to Buyers transactions.
“We have seen this as an opportunity for even more listings to be available on this tool. We have taken multiple buyer interest signals (such as Abandoned Cart and Heavy Browse) and made them available to our sellers, enabling around 20% more listings to be eligible to send offers, and we’re excited to continue implementing more such signals in the future. We have also added an option for sellers to automate sending offers, making it easy for sellers to use this tool while also helping them reach more buyers.
As we march ahead in our tech-led reimagination, and strive to be the platform of choice for sellers and create lifelong, trusted relationships with buyers, we will continue innovating on behalf of our customers to further their success and create economic opportunity for all.”
– eBay
